Sex is what sells Venus In Fur, especially to those whose sex life is void of kink or those whose kink it is to watch two people engage in smart witty talk about kink, with enough fishnet stockings and black patent leather to keep the eyes riveted, all insulated by the reality that no gooey effluent or guilt will stick to their forehead.
And that is a big drag. Because while David Ives' 2011 play is, on the most obvious level, about kink and sex and gender politics and class and power and all that shit that seems so important until you're actually fucking, the play is about something far more titillating—and far more fascinating—than sex and all the politics that goes with it. So, contrary to what you may have read, Venus In Fur is less an edgy, naughty sex comedy than it is a revenge play that leaps over the blood and gore of Jacobean tragedy and draws its source from the lusty, vain group of perverted sociopaths atop Mount Olympus in the stories of ancient Greece.
Its lineage should not surprise anyone familiar with Ives' work, particularly the series of short plays he wrote in his early 1990s collection, All In the Timing. Some aspect of time—framed in Ives' stylized, absurd, intellectually witty language—manifested in each of the plays, and it's no different with Venus. The play takes place in a sparsely furnished rehearsal space in contemporary New York City. The production being auditioned is an adaptation of the 1870 erotic novel Venus In Furs. And the hints of ancient Greek myth that eddy through the play's early minutes transform into a gale by its end.
Thomas (Graham Hamilton, who warms up when his character stops being an insufferably pedantic crower and starts sporting a woody) is a frustrated playwright with talent and productions under his belt, but he's never satisfied with others directing them; it becomes evident that his frustration isn't limited to his work in the theater. Determined to direct his own adaptation of Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's chestnut of erotic literature, he has spent a grueling day auditioning dozens of actresses for the role of Vanda, the young, gorgeous widow with whom the novel's protagonist, Severin, falls in slave.
In walks “Vanda,” who claims her real name is Wanda (a wickedly talented and chameleon-ish Jaimi Paige). She's a potty-mouthed, overemoting struggling actress whom Thomas is convinced lacks the prerequisite dignity and class to pull off an aristocratic woman. The fact that she has arrived to the audition hours late and looking as if she got lost on her way to Plato's Retreat doesn't engender much confidence in the playwright/director.
But when she pleads and guilts him into letting her read, we realize there is more—much, much more—to her. Power roles continually shift, between director and actress and dominant and submissive, and the questions of who wields the Upper Hand in their temporal and psychic relationship and, most important, why take the audience on a creative, witty, tight 100-minute ride. The mystery of Vanda isn't unveiled until the play's final moments (and anyone who doesn't walk out knowing just who she truly is after Casey Stangl's emphatic last images is probably too concerned with rubbing one out on the ride home than seriously engaging with this play).
Some might quibble with Ives' self-indulgence. The language is arrogantly highbrow at times, and plays about playwrights are usually less interesting than a proctologist giving himself an enema—if just as messy. But Ives is too talented a writer to beat around too long in the erudite ether, and he lands on sweaty, sticky ground often enough to keep things interesting for the uncultivated rabble. Of course, the presence onstage of a long-legged, scantily clad attractive woman and the S&M word- and physical play doesn't hurt.
But, again, this is not a play about sex or kink—at least, not really. It's the play's currency, absolutely, but the idea that Ives appears to be selling isn't what drives people to want to dominate—or submit—in the bedroom or of getting in touch with their sexuality; it's how honest we are in our relationship to the world at large. And when one character's dishonesty is unmasked, and this character stands or, more accurately, is strapped, naked for the audience to see, a primal force is unleashed. It is an energy that isn't sexual or political or masculine or feminine, but human in all its divine fury. As those iconic observers on spirituality, AC/DC, once asked, “Who made who?” In Venus In Fur, it seems that on the most personal level, we have made ourselves; and if we're not honest with that, there could be hell, or at least a God or Goddess or two, to make us pay.
Joel Beers has written about theater and other stuff for this infernal rag since its very first issue in, when was that again???